Chocolatapp vs Howl
When comparing Chocolatapp vs Howl, the Slant community recommends Howl for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” Howl is ranked 21st while Chocolatapp is ranked 54th. The most important reason people chose Howl is:
You don't need the mouse to use Howl. Everything can be accomplished with commands and shortcuts.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Split editing
Viewing two files at once is easy in Chocolatapp. Just select them both in the sidebar.
Pro Code completion
Pro Great user interface
Pro Multiple cursors and selections
Pro Live error checking
Chocolat constantly checks your code as you’re writing it. That means no more interruptions from rude parse errors.
Pro Code folding
Pro Built-in language documentation
Pro Live previewing of HTML and Markdown
Pro Light application
Pro Keyboard driven
You don't need the mouse to use Howl. Everything can be accomplished with commands and shortcuts.
Pro Fast startup
It's extremely lightweight, making it start up pretty quickly.
Pro Easy to use
Howl is very intuitive and easy to use.
Pro Easy to extend
Plugins (bundles) can be written in Lua or MoonScript.
Pro UI Focused on editting
Non distracted icons, toolbars, pannels, extra spacing, etc.
Pro Language tooling
Has built-in functionality for completion, inline documentation and linting so IDE-like features can be added easily.
Pro Command line palette
Search for your commands in an easy way and see in the list which key-strokes are mapped to which commands
Pro Open source
Howl is an open source project and is actively developed on GitHub(howl-editor/howl). It has a MIT license.
Pro Works on OpenBSD
Cons
Con Only available for Mac
It's only available for OSX.
Con Paid application
Chocolatapp is not a free application.
Con Lack of Lua examples
Although Howl can be extended in both Lua and MoonScript, almost all bundles are written in MoonScript. This means that it is a bit harder to find examples if you'd rather write your bundle in Lua. MoonScript can be compiled to Lua but the code won't be as clean and understandable as if it would've been written in Lua by hand.